Users assigned to an organization can see only the elements that belong to that organization. If users are assigned to more than one organization, they see all elements that belong to the organizations to which they are assigned. For example, assume you created two organizations: one called OnlyHosts that allowed access to only hosts and another called OnlySwitches that allowed access to only switches. A user assigned to OnlyHosts and OnlySwitches would have access to hosts and switches because those elements are listed in at least one of the organizations.

Organizations can also contain other organizations. An organization contained within another is called a child. The organization containing a child organization is called a parent. The figure below shows a parent-child hierarchy in which BostonWebHosts organization contains two child organizations, BostonWebHost_Windows and BostonWebHost_Solaris. BostonWebHosts is a parent because it contains two organizations.

Figure 20 Parent-Child Hierarchy for Organizations

If a child contains organizations, it is also a parent. For example, if you add two organizations called BostonWebMarketing and BostonWebProduction to BostonWebHost_Windows. BostonWebHost_Windows would become a parent because it now contains two organizations. It would also be a child because it is contained in BostonWebHosts.

Parent organizations allow access to all elements listed in their child organizations. For example, users assigned to the organization BostonWebHosts can access not only the elements in BostonWebHost_Windows, but also those in BostonWebHost_Solaris. This is because BostonWebHosts is a parent of the two child organizations.

The parent-child hierarchy for organizations saves you time when you add new elements; for example, when you add a new element, you need to add it only once; the change ripples through the hierarchy. For example, if you add an element to BostonWebHost_Windows, not only users assigned to BostonWebHost_Windows would see this addition, but also users assigned to any of the parent organizations containing BostonWebHost_Windows. For example, users assigned to BostonWebHosts would also see the addition because it contains BostonWebHost_Windows; users assigned to only BostonWebHost_Solaris would not see the addition.

A child organization can be in multiple parent organizations. As shown in the following figure BostonWebHosts and NYWebHosts are not only children of the WebHosts organization, but they are also children of the US East Coast organization. For example, if you have a user that oversees all Web hosts in the company, you could assign that user to the WebHosts organization. Users managing hosts and storage systems on the East Coast would be assigned to the US East Coast organization, which is a parent of BostonWebHosts, NYWebHosts, and StorageSystems organizations. For example, if an element is added to NYWebHost_Solaris, users assigned to one or more of the following organizations would see the addition:

HP Storage Essentials SRM 6.0 User Guide 141